Decalogue: Top 10 Films of 2014

Although I can’t say that I’ve seen many more new films during this past calendar year than this selection of ten, I can say that this selection of notable films released in 2014 all moved, entertained, or challenged me in some way or other and are worthy of mention at this time of annual listified recaps. Links to relevant full RandomDanglingMystery reviews are included by each ranked entry, and my similar list for 2012 is here.

1. The Lego Movie (Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller)

“The Lego Movie delights in its contradictions and that saves it from being swallowed up in them. It thrills at the suggestion of its own self-negation, repeatedly flips the concept of tonal or metaphorical consistency head over heels, and spirals off giddily in clever asides, inventive visuals, and boundless, wall-demolishing energy. Though its text self-consciously celebrates the disordered, nonsensical creative exhilaration of a child with only a Lego set and a limitless imagination, the construction and character of the text itself is the greatest celebration of that enervating impulse imaginable.”

2. Tim’s Vermeer (Directed by Teller)

“Tim’s Vermeer makes the master’s achievement seem grander and more ingenious even while systematically demystifying the amorphous cult of the genius. The technical ingenuity and problem-solving acumen that Tim Jenison demonstrates and implicitly attributes to Johannes Vermeer need not preclude the evolved creative instincts and aesthetic vision that are breathlessly (and lazily) imparted to ineffable ‘genius’. Tim’s Vermeer suggests that sophisticated technical achievement is its own form of genius, and can tessellate seamlessly with loftier visions to form the genesis of a most memorable art.”

3. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Directed by Matt Reeves)

“Who would have reasonably believed it? The summer’s most intelligently crafted blockbuster is descended from a long line of stiff, heavy-handed sci-fi B-movies; Hollywood’s most emotionally and politically resonant statement of this silliest of movie seasons features a gaggle of simians (some of them riding horses!) as its protagonists. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes should be (and at its core truly remains) ridiculous. And yet it’s serious without being pedantic, suffused with soulful feeling instead of cornball manipulativeness, a powerful spectacle whose inevitably conflict grows organically from situations, characters relations, and ideologically differences.”

4. Frank (Directed by Lenny Abrahamson)

“Abrahamson’s film, a sort of outsider riff on This is Spinal Tap for the millenial hipster subculture, is a sharply absurdist and frequently hilarious satire of indie culture’s indulgent meta-embrace of creative expression for its own sake, as well as a dismantling of the bohemian ideal of artistic genesis as an outlet for transference of suffering and turmoil.”

5. Godzilla (Directed by Gareth Edwards)

“Director Gareth Edwards tantrically holds off on a full frontal of his titular iconic reptilian monster for nearly an hour. Even this reveal is tantalizing brief, if also so powerfully iconic as to merit actual in-theater applause and conclusively prove his adoration for the material. Much of his film is vivid rising action and subtle, realist, almost zen-like enormity leading to spikes of even greater enormity.”

6. Mr. Turner (Directed by Mike Leigh)

“Mr. Turner is one of the year’s most gorgeously photographed films, and will surely earn cinematographer Dick Pope an Oscar nomination (if not a win) if enough Academy members have the right kind of eyes. In exquisitely-shot landscapes that often directly recreate Turner’s grand canvasses in the motion picture frame, Leigh and Pope demonstrate the occasionally-glimpsed sublimity that Turner was able to muster out of his mostly mundane daily life.”

8. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Directed by Peter Jackson)

“From its opening sequence, The Battle of the Five Armies strives for a much less flippant tone [than that of its predecessors]. Picking up moments after The Desolation of Smaug‘s cliffhanger with that film’s titular dragon swooping down with fiery catastrophe on wooden Laketown, The Battle of the Five Armies is a relentlessly paced wringer of a dire war movie. Unlike the book, in which Bilbo gets a bump on the head and naps through the meat-grinder of the battle, Jackson shows us thousands of beings breathing their last (some of which we might even have come to care about) and does not treat the slaughter with anything less than a stiff-lipped seriousness.”

9. Snowpiercer (Directed by Bong Joon-ho)

“The alternately viscerally brutal and thoroughly ludicrous dystopian action thriller Snowpiercer is such an indescribable cinematic text that even an accurate synopsis does not begin to scratch the surface of its bleak, steely, bloody vision. To state it matter-of-factly, Snowpiercer is about a stark future in which the entire surviving remnant of humanity travels through a permafrozen landscape aboard a self-sustaining, socially-stratified train running on an eternal global loop. But this description does little justice to Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho’s harshly ambitious, remarkably designed, and often functionally insane visual, thematic, and sociopolitical embellishments to a much simpler French graphic novel narrative along the same lines.”

10. Guardians of the Galaxy (Directed by James Gunn)

“Guardians of the Galaxy also suggests a fine pop song with its aesthetic appeal, throwaway wit, and brief but penetrating stabs of emotion. It breezes by in a burst of slick, violent, energetic delight. It’s what Marvel Studios films, in their generally successful but often joyless quest for a balance between storytelling coherence, character integrity, and sociopolitical resonance, often forget to be: tremendously, often transgressively, fun.”